First of all I’d like say that I’ve never been as sad seeing a proposal before and I can’t help to think that this is part of a general effort to divide the project (see this proposal asking to remove me from the board just 1 month after being elected).
With Proof Of Humanity being maintained by the Kleros Cooperative (which develops Kleros, but also projects of the ecosystem including Proof Of Humanity), this would have for effect of firing the entire Proof Of Humanity paid team (devs, smart contract auditors, cryptoeconomists, community managers) as the cooperative cannot allocate funding to projects outside of the Kleros ecosystem.
Answering proposed arguments
First I would answer all the points of this proposal.
As UBI is a project built on top of Proof Of Humanity, it looks like adding uses to UBI would help the project, wouldn’t it?
Well that’s not that simple as if Proof Of Humanity was built on top of Kleros, Kleros is also building on top of Proof Of Humanity with human courts on V2. So it looks likes the interest of one project of the ecosystem would clash with another one.
Here the fairest approach would be to keep the initial arbitrator, particularly since funding and development for the project came from it (Kleros, gives PNK grants to the Kleros Cooperative, which in turn sells those and develops Proof Of Humanity).
The author doesn’t give any specific example of “loophole” abuse. Moreover, the rules are decided by Proof Of Humanity, so if there is a loophole in the rules somewhere, that’s something the DAO can fix, not Kleros.
On the “concentration” in the Human Court, let’s look at some graph of stake repartitions in this court:
We could compare it with Ethereum mining repartition to see that the Human Court is well balanced even for crypto standards.
There has never been any threat from Kleros to “capture” PoH in governance gridlock. Everything which was voted by the DAO was always enforced by the Kleros Governor (contract allowing people to implement governance decisions from a technical perspective and solving disputes through Kleros in case of disagreement over the implementation), actually there hasn’t even been one dispute about that.
Moreover, separation of powers (the DAO being the legislative and Kleros the judiciary, see this ETHCC talk) is important for DAOs. In particular, separation of powers helps in making sure that decisions are taken based on the rules and not political considerations.
This would actually be the opposite. By making a fork of current version of Kleros, it would not be possible to customize courts for this. However, by staying within the Kleros ecosystem, Proof Of Humanity would benefit from the version 2 of Kleros with modular court allowing those mechanisms (only allowing humans, quadratic drawing weights). Moreover, those courts relying on Proof of Humanity could be used by other projects, not just PoH. This would lead to more PoH use.
Is the proposal really about the arbitrator?
This proposal appears to have been done after some drama in the Spanish Proof Of Humanity telegram.
For those who haven’t followed, an admin (Luis who lost the election for the board) had removed the administration rights of two board members (Shin and myself).
Note that there wasn’t anything “illegal” into adding board members as admin, the DAO had never voted on group admins and the closest expression of the DAO related to that topic was HIP-7 stating that the board should manage “Any resource requiring high trust by the community”.
After that the cooperative restored the administration rights to a neutral state (only board members) allowing the board to nominate more moderators. After that the board set up rules about moderator designation and moderation.
This led to an admin (here it’s hard to tell whom as the password was shared between multiple people) using the Proof Of Humanity Twitter for accusations (which were removed and the password reset).
This infuriated the admins who had been removed (even if those could have asked the board to vote them back as admin) who created another telegram channel.
There, they made their plan to remove me from the board leading to HIP-48 and to remove Kleros leading to this HIP.
I obviously support people making proposals if they think those improves Proof Of Humanity. But here it looks more that this was done by some people having a personal crusade in order to “punish” Federico and myself and not with the best interest of the protocol.
I also got weird DMs, one guy comparing me and my actions to Putin mass murders in Ukraine, some homophobic and racist comments.
As a project founder we need to have tough skin, but I would be lying if I pretended not to be affected by this public lynching in a language that I cannot speak, but can understand.
I wonder about the real goal of this proposal and believe other people are wondering too.
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it
Currently Kleros has been providing good services to Proof Of Humanity at a very cheap price (on average 1$ per registration). Out of the 614 cases, I defy anyone to show any “obviously wrong” ruling given by it.
I understand the argument of giving more value to UBI, but as the fees to jurors are quite low (lifetime of 10k$), this wouldn’t have much effect value to the staking token is determined in relation to:
Juror_Revenue - Value_Of_Juror_Time_Spent - Gas_Fees_Paid_By_Juror.
You can find a more detailed model on this research note of William.
Current Synergistic Relationship
Proof of Humanity was invented (based on an idea of Vitalik Buterin, see this initial paper), developed (starting in August 2019 during the bear market) and is still developed by the Kleros Cooperative. There is currently:
- 1 dev completely focused on it (Andrei)
- 1 dev working on the infra around it. He is working for the infra in general but Proof of Humanity is probably the most demanding part (was the target of some IPFS DOS which even led to some data loss that was fixed and lost deposits were reimbursed by the cooperative)
- 6 devs helping sporadically with smart contract reviews, specific tasks and tech support.
- 1 integration manager working partly on it (trying to get other projects to use PoH)
- 2 Moderators/Community managers working partially on it, maintaining the English PoH channel, organizing community calls.
- 2 founders working partially on it, reaching out and helping other projects to use PoH (helping @Artistical_Intelligence, incubating and advising Yubiai)
There are even more people working on Kleros in general (20). Working on Kleros is half of the operation of the cooperative. Working on ecosystem development (which includes PoH) is the other half.
All of those are PoH members and registered. Some also actively promoting PoH among friends in their personal time.
The fees paid are quite low: 25$ per juror (and jurors need to pay for gas so the real pay is even lower) with disputes starting with 1 juror, the total paid (by the way this website is supporting UBI by using 90% of its revenues to burn UBI) being slightly below 10k$ and are far from offsetting the contributor compensation (even if we don’t count juror work). However, Proof Of Humanity serves as a flagship integration (perhaps the most famous) allowing to prove that Kleros work.
Moreover, the currently developed Kleros V2 will allow (see the yellow paper p10-11) courts filled with Proof Of Humanity jurors (to prevent jurors being drawn multiple times). So Kleros will rely more and more in Proof Of Humanity in the future.
For this reasons, the cooperative has incentive into the success of Proof of Humanity.
Similarly, Proof of Humanity benefits from Kleros:
- It was created by it (by the coop receiving PNK grants from Kleros).
- It gets continuous support and development.
- It gets a high level of security (ultimately backed against 51% attacks by a 15M$ market cap).
- While paying a very cheap price for it (10k$ paid in total). Note that on lost deposits in case of rejected registration, only 0.025ETH goes to the juror, the remaining 0.1 going to the challenger. With an approximate 4% challenge rate, this means that Proof Of Humanity pays an average of 1$ per submission to the Kleros protocol (way lower than gas costs).
There is a synergistic relationship that would be broken by this proposal.
Resource Management Perspective
Currently the Proof Of Humanity is extremely understaffed compared to the potential of the project. This proposal having the effect of firing all the paid team (as those are paid by the Cooperative, in turn paid by Kleros, which obviously cannot pay for competing projects outside of its ecosystem) would turn chronic under-staffing making progress slow into critical under-staffing where even maintenance of the infrastructure would not be guaranteed.
As most of the Kleros team loves Proof Of Humanity, some may still help in their free time. But after such a proposal this is nothing but guaranteed.
Adding the creation and maintenance of a Kleros fork would also add to that burden. This may even represent some existential risks to Proof Of Humanity.
Risks of Running a fork
The main risks are:
-
Lack of maintenance leading to some services being unavailable. The cooperative is running a bunch of services making Kleros use easy, a frontend, bots to execute function calls which can be executed by everyone, notification services, etc. The smart contract can always run without those, but that would make the UX way worse and hard to use by non technical users.
-
Attacks on the court. The current court has been running without attacks since 2019. But a new court may not work that way, in particular if there isn’t much payouts to jurors and apparently the proposer would like for there to be even less disputes after changing the court.
- Without a flow disputes or the expectation of a future flow, UBI wouldn’t be much valuable (currently only offering economic security of 0.5M$, 15 times lower than PNK). This would significantly decrease budget security (how much do you need to have for an attack to be successful).
- Moreover, since UBI is already valuable independently of being used in a Kleros fork, this would mean that in case of attack its value wouldn’t drop to 0. So the cost security (how much it would cost the attacker to attack the system) would be even lower.
Using Kleros as a large arbitrator with a lot of integrations means that security is mutualized between the dapps using it, making each of them more secure.
Vision for Proof of Humanity
Here this proposal is about the vision of Proof of Humanity.
Should it be a protocol searching collaboration? Or more of a protocol self centered in some manner akin to nationalism (we only want “pure” PoH works where pure being what is built on top of PoH and not what PoH relies on, talking about “sovereignty”).
One of the main reasons that I am a believer in web3 is the composability (sometimes called money lego). People build protocols on top of and connected to each others, leading to systems of systems that individual projects could not accomplish by themselves.
For example when we created Proof Of Humanity, we were thinking that one of the first usecases would be to distribute a Universal Basic Income. We had plans for that but preferred to have this handled by another team and that’s why we reached out to Democracy Earth which had announced a UBI token (at this time called HOUR) to see if they would be interested using Proof Of Humanity. We accepted and also helped them with the smart contract of the token, pools for bootstrapping liquidity and integrated claiming tokens directly in the UI. All of this without getting any of the initial supply of UBI which belongs to Democracy Earth and the DAO, as we believed collaborating with other projects was more important.
This was also true for what would go on bottom: better to use Ethereum instead of creating a new chain. In the same way that using Ethereum allows for network effects, using Kleros allows for network effects (new version of Kleros developed to use Proof Of Humanity, Kleros community “shilling” PoH for people to integrate, Kleros community apps burning UBI).
I think the Proof of Humanity community would benefit from being seen as cooperative. And here, removing the arbitrator which funded and made the project for reasons more related to “politics” than security would probably be seen as uncooperative/ungrateful and send a wrong signal to organizations which may consider funding or working with Proof Of Humanity.
The move forward
There are a few way that we could go forward without negatively impacting Proof Of Humanity.
We should acknowledge that some part of community (a subset of the community of the Spanish speaking telegram) has bad feelings against Kleros and the creators of Proof of Humanity.
Starting from there, a few roads are possible:
- See that the divisions are irreconcilable and have the wider community take the side of this HIP leading to all the impacts before-mentioned.
- See that the divisions are irreconcilable while the wider community rejects this HIP. In this case, the part of the community supporting it could deploy a fork of the project (without needing to restart the list of human from scratch as it could recognize humans registered before the fork).
- Manage to solve internal divisions which I believe are mainly the fruit of miscommunication, the language barrier not helping.
For me my order of preference is clearly 3 > 2 > 1. But ultimately it’s up to the community to decide.